


A Feeling, A Four-Letter Word

by kittykatthetacodemon



Series: Luck of the Draw [6]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 15:19:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11187858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittykatthetacodemon/pseuds/kittykatthetacodemon
Summary: "If Vasquez had half-forgotten what it meant to be human, most times it felt like this guero, with his cards and his drink and his deceptively lazy smile, had never learned in the first place."Or, the one where everything is exactly the same, except they all have superpowers, and also Vasquez really has to wonder why life keeps punching him in the face.  Alternate POV for "Look at My Hands, Don't Look at My Hands" and "Trust Falls and Probability Exercises."FAIR WARNING: THIS WILL NOT MAKE ANY SENSE WITHOUT READING PARTS 1 & 3 OF THIS SERIES.





	A Feeling, A Four-Letter Word

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kat2107](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kat2107/gifts).



> This fought me like a little bitch, but since I was paid in actual real-life cookies from not only another country, but also from another goddamn continent...here it is. It exists. I did this thing, and I take responsibility for it, good or bad.
> 
> Here we have Vasquez's POV for...basically everything? The request was for the end of chapter seven of Trust Falls from Vasquez's POV, but I got ambitious and ended up needing to beat my head against a concrete wall for three months to actually finish the damn thing. And here we are, on the far side of the discovery that I do not enjoy writing Vasquez's POV. 
> 
> Que sera, sera

Vasquez’s first life ended like this: there was a dead man, a wanted poster, and a bounty high enough to make his head spin.  No doubt every lawman and bounty hunter across the whole of the States knew his name and his face the minute some bastard had gone and put a price like  _five hundred dollars_  on his head.

It felt unreal, sometimes, and he’d beenthere for every step of it.  He’d killed a man—or had he?  The man had deserved it—or had he?  According to the law, he was a murderer, even if nobody had seemed much inclined to hear his side of the story.  Some days he thought the truth didn’t matter anymore, not really, not when there were posters bearing his name and his face, a bounty and the words “Dead or Alive.”  True or not, justified or not, one of these days someone was going to try and string him up for it.

He ran.

Running meant  _running_ , really and truly, moving as fast and as far as he could as if the hounds of Hell itself were on his heels.  Running meant throwing away his name; it meant leaving behind everyone he had ever known and everything but what he could carry.  It meant living in a constant state of low-level panic, his gift turned up as strong as he could make it just so he could guess at the intentions of every stranger he passed.  He found himself looking for some subtle  _click_  of recognition in each mind, like a lock snapping shut on the chains around his wrists.

Of course, when it finally happened, he didn’t see it coming.

He stopped to gather supplies in some two-bit town, and that was where the first bounty hunters caught up to him.  There were four of them, well-fed and well-rested where he was still hollow-eyed and jittery from days sleeping out in the middle of nowhere with one eye open, watching the road behind him.  They were smart enough to come up on him on either side, to draw first before they asked any questions, so that even armed he would have some trouble getting at his weapons before catching a bullet.

“You’re a wanted man, mister,” said one of the bounty hunters, the one who seemed to be the leader.  He had his gun trained squarely at Vasquez’s forehead.

It wasn’t a bad plan, all told.  With anyone else, it might have worked.

“You don’t know what you’re dealing with,  _cabrón,_ ” Vasquez said, snapped, because he was not anyone else, and it wasn’t going to work.

The insults that were spewed back at him weren’t worth repeating.

The wave of  _rage-bitter-fury_  that came slamming out of him was immediate—it bought him a flinch, just a momentary twitch toward covering their ears, like the head-splitting strength of feeling Vasquez was throwing out was real enough to block that way.  It was more than enough.  His guns were already in his hands before anyone had time to recover.  He darted in toward the leader and his gun, slapping it aside so that first instinctive shot went wide.

Four on one really wasn’t fair, when that one was running wild and fighting for his life.  Four bodies hit the dirt, and didn’t get back up.

The first time he’d seen a man die had been shocking.  He’d known it instantly, though he’d never felt it before, the same way he’d know the difference between true silence and something he had only thought was silence, once the one became the other.  The man’s mind had been  _there_ , even if he hadn’t noticed it, like some undefinable background noise, like the droning buzz of insects or the shushingsound of wind in the high grass.  It had been there, and then it was not, and the difference was—it was something.  He hadn’t much liked to think on it.

But that had been years before, and he’d long since gotten past that instinctive flinch.  He couldn’t let death faze him now, not even with four corpses in the dirt, so he managed to spit on the ground at his feet before stumbling off and heading— _away_ , anywhere, so long as there were no guns to his head.

Vasquez felt uncomfortably like he’d gotten the bounty first, and earned it afterward.

* * *

Empaths weren’t meant to be alone.  No person was, not really, but something about the way his powers went strained after those first few weeks way off in the wilds told him that it was more than simple loneliness twisting in the pit of his stomach. 

People had always pulled away from his gift; most didn’t appreciate the idea of anyone reaching inside their heads, even if he meant no harm.  Still, it had always been there, even those times when he’d done his level best to curl into his own self and spend his days pretending he couldn’t feel anything at all.  Before this, he had never spent so long staying so far from human company, and damn it all, it  _ached_.

In the end, he ignored it.  It was better than the alternatives.

He kept moving, kept himself distant.  Those few times he needed to stop in at a town, he always made sure to get his supplies, get his information, and then get the hell out of dodge.  There was always a looming sense of something chasing after him, snapping at his heels, maybe especially in those moments when he wanted nothing more than to cling to whatever peace and stability he’d managed to find.  Sometimes, it felt like the weight of it all would choke him.

In the end, he ignored that, too.  He preferred it to choking on the end of a hangman’s noose.

* * *

Vasquez’s second life started something like this: nearly three straight months without human contact, with only the quiet grating sweetly along his nerves, and eventually, with a corpse sharing his new cabin.

The man really had been dead when Vasquez got there.  After everything, it still felt like an important distinction to make, even though so many other things had been stripped away in that first stumbling shift from something human to something hunted.  He had killed, yes, and he would kill again when the time came, but he hadn’t fallen low enough yet to murder a man for a bed and four ramshackle walls.

And really, a dead man wasn’t the worst company.  He was quieter than most, after all, and aside from the blow-flies he didn’t make much of a mess.

It wasn’t all that long before Emma Cullen and Sam Chisolm showed up.  Maybe he wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d known, then, just how much they’d change everything.  As it was, Vasquez felt them coming from miles off, like the faintest sound of distant thunder, and resented it, even as the knowing surprised him.  His range had never been anything like it before, but he thought it wasn’t too strange to believe that he might have stretched a little, reached out in the silence and emptiness around him, miles and miles of open space with no other human mind to push and clamor against his own.

It did give him a little more time to get clear, to wait for the best moment to make his move.

They hadn’t expected the body.  He’d felt it the moment they did, the surprise souring quickly into panic, the same in both invaders to his space, though Chisolm had hidden it better.  He wondered if Chisolm believed he hadn’t done it.  He wondered if it really mattered.

He wondered what it said about him, that he had almost forgotten what it was about the cabin that might send them reeling.

The woman, coiled tight and raging with more suppressed anger than fear, was a surprise.  The proposition was more of one.  The biggest surprise of all was that, somehow, despite every good reason to keep well clear of the whole mess, he found himself agreeing to come along.

* * *

Except—if he was honest with himself, and he always tried to be—Vasquez’s second life started something like this: Sam Chisolm had seen the bounty, seen the charges on his head, and left his gun behind.

No one tried to argue with a rabid dog.  They didn’t threaten, they didn’t persuade, and they certainly didn’t ask it for help.  A rabid dog got a bullet between the eyes, if it got anything at all.  And by now even Vasquez could see that he’d started to forget what it was to be human.  He’d been all animal instinct for so long, caught by the throat between fight and flight, but this—

Sam Chisolm came prepared to  _bargain_ , when everyone knew there was no use in asking a wild animal for any kind of deal.

So, if he was honest with himself, it really wasn’t all that odd that when Vasquez opened his mouth to turn the whole thing down flat, what came out instead was  _yes_.

* * *

He had dismissed Faraday at first.  At least, he had dismissed Faraday as an individual, too busy taking in the rattle of nerves and distrust and discomfort that rushed through all the newcomers at once, too busy trying to search out the sharp edges and figure out where and when to expect the first bite.  Nobody  _liked_  his gift; a few could maybe learn to live with it, at least for a little while.  It was important to know now which way these men would fall.  To that end, he didn’t bother reining himself in, letting his powers rumble out to meet them in ways he usually would never dare outside a fight.

After all that, it was a bit of a surprise when Faraday—drunk, sleepy-looking Faraday, wavering on his feet even as his hands stayed perfectly steady—had taken it all in and then opened his mind up to Vasquez’s, challenge and humor and something with just a hint of teeth.

* * *

Vasquez found that he liked them, and that was probably trouble in the making.  He couldn’t keep them, after all, provided they all managed to survive the coming storm in the first place.

But Sam Chisolm was quick as a wink and had a mind as steady as a drumbeat.  Sometimes Horne wavered in ways Vasquez couldn’t quite understand, but he was fierce and fiercely devoted to what he considered his.  Red Harvest had an undeniable sense of humor lurking somewhere out of sight.  Goody was completely sure of himself except when he wasn’t, when anger and fear hummed out of tune in the corners of his thoughts.  Billy was a slippery bastard, his gift making his emotions a trick to pin down, but at the same time, it was a pleasure to be around someone whose every feeling wasn’t pounding along in the back of Vasquez’s head, begging to be heard.

Faraday was something else entirely.  Faraday felt like the rumble of distant thunder, like a joke only half-told.  He was a drunk and an idiot, and damn it all if Vasquez didn’t find it  _charming_.  If Vasquez had half-forgotten what it meant to be human, most times it felt like this  _guero_ , with his cards and his drink and his deceptively lazy smile, had never learned in the first place.

And Faraday—Faraday let him poke and prod, let him reach out with his gift and reached back in turn.  Vasquez would have gotten it all regardless, if he’d really wanted it, but Faraday had offered his mind up like it was nothing, and Vasquez was too damn greedy to feel guilty that the man probably didn’t even know what he was offering.

Surely, he’d regret it.  He’d change his mind.  He’d get bored, like a kid with a new toy, as soon as the novelty wore off.  There was a time limit on this, same as everything else, and if Vasquez let himself get comfortable, Faraday would surely remember one day that Vasquez was climbing  _in his head_ , tied and tangled like ivy digging into cracks in a brick wall.  Vasquez knew better than to put down any roots, in that case, and save himself the trouble when the time came and Faraday asked him to tear himself free.

He knew better.  He did.  But he’d been alone for so long—too long—inside his head and out, and he wasn’t willing to give up that bare inch of  _something_  even when he knew how much more it would hurt later.  If—when—they all died, there wouldn’t even  _be_  a later, so he could have this much.  Couldn’t he?

* * *

And then there was the story that everyone remembered: a town turned into a battlefield, a deadfall trap, a killing field.  There were the living and the dying—and the dead, though Vasquez’s gift wasn’t built to see them, except in the empty spaces they left behind as they passed.

McCann, the bastard excuse for an empath, shot Faraday.  Vasquez shot McCann.  Everyone left standing did their level best to shoot each other.

There was a church and a Gatling gun, a suicide run and a sudden, deafening silence from a mind that Vasquez hadn’t fully noticed he was tracking until it was gone.

* * *

Emma Cullen did what necromancers did best: she raised the dead.

That wasn’t the moment Vasquez knew what Faraday would come to mean to him, but maybe it should have been.  There was blood and muck and gunpowder under his fingernails, a patched-together body on its back in the dirt, and a necromancer breathing for two as Faraday came gasping back to life, mind and body both at once.  It was a rare day when Vasquez so much as considered taking someone else’s pain, but when Faraday jolted under Emma Cullen’s hands and then _screamed_ , Vasquez didn’t stop to consider much of anything.

One second he was standing clear, and the next he had his hands against Faraday’s skin, drawing pain into himself, doing his best to share the load.  Maybe it should have been strange, but it felt as natural as breathing.

Chisolm took charge, tried to make sure that Faraday was still present and himself.  Vasquez went along with it, even though he could feel enough with his own gift to be just about certain—no two minds were exactly alike, and Faraday’s _felt_ about like it should, under the pile of agony.

It felt wrong to take his hands away from where he’d been cradling Faraday’s jaw, even though it meant he didn’t feel Faraday’s agony like it was his own anymore.  Faraday jolted back awake like he’d been electrified, which was all Chisolm had really wanted, and Vasquez didn’t hesitate to bring himself back into skin-on-skin contact.  It was obvious that Doc had only healed Faraday enough for Emma Cullen to shove his spirit back inside, not enough to save him all the aches of being blown to bits.

“You know who you are?” Chisolm said, serious as anything.  As much as they all liked their employer, they didn’t much know how her gift worked, and Vasquez agreed that it didn’t seem like the sort of thing worth the risk of a mistake.

“The world’s greatest lover,” Faraday said, smiling like the sunrise, and for a moment he was awake and aware and himself, and he was alive, alive, _alive_ —and then that smile slid off his face, and his mind slipped sideways like something falling off a cliff and out of sight.

It didn’t take Vasquez that much longer to figure out that was just about normal for dealing with Faraday: feeling halfway between bursting into laughter and like he’d taken a punch to the gut.

* * *

Vasquez didn’t sleep for days while Faraday healed.  Faraday slept sometimes, or seemed to—sometimes he was as still as the grave, as still as if he’d never been raised at all, and sometimes he bolted straight upright in the bed and screamed, and screamed, and screamed.  The other five took to hovering around, oddly more steadying than distracting, while Vasquez pulled the pain out from under Faraday’s skin and into himself, biting his tongue until it bled to keep silent.

They never talked about it.  Maybe Faraday knew better than to ask.

* * *

 Time passed.  Vasquez had known going in that there was no way to travel with the others without spending time in their heads, wanted or not, but he hadn’t quite expected the way it got easier—the way they all offered up parts of themselves, inside their minds and out.

Goody got a particular look in his eye, an off-pitch hum in his thoughts, on those days he couldn’t shoot without breaking something vital in him.  Billy counted knives like rosary beads after nightmares that he couldn’t remember.  Horne sometimes eyed Red Harvest like he was surprised the man’s scalp was still attached; Red Harvest sometimes eyed the six of them like he was surprised to see anyone at all.  Chisolm went to dark places some nights that even Goody couldn’t talk him out of, but he always came out of it with the sunrise.

Vasquez tried not to think too hard on what the others had picked up from him in turn.

And then, of course, there was Faraday—it seemed like everything came back to Faraday, in the end, whyever that might be.  Faraday, who held his mind open like a dare, and then like a courtesy, and eventually like it genuinely hadn’t occurred to him to keep Vasquez out.  Faraday, who laughed and drank and cheated at cards, winking at Vasquez under the shadow of his hat.  Faraday, who smiled like a shark at the chance of a fight, kept one hand close to his guns, and felt so damned thrilled whenever things started to go wrong.

Hope was sweet—maybe he’d get to keep this, for once.  Wouldn’t that be something?

And hope hurt, too—he’d spent too long alone to really expect anything else.

* * *

It was good to be safe for once.

It took Vasquez only a couple days to decide that despite every moment of his life so far and all his last drops of common sense, he _trusted_ the six men at his back.  In turn, it didn’t take the six of them long at all to notice that Vasquez was a happy drunk.

That wasn’t to say that he couldn’t hold his drink, but the moment that buzz hit he found himself pleased with himself and the state of the world in general.  He spoke louder, smiled easier, laughed longer, told crude jokes and played loose with his tongue and his guns.  A buzz wasn’t bad at all, so long as it stopped there.

But when he was _drunk_ —that was a chance for real danger.  There was a sweet spot past buzzed but before blacked-out, and when Vasquez felt safe enough to find it, the world went warm and soft as taffy and he went soft along with it, until he was liable to do just about anything if a friend suggested it in a reasonable enough tone of voice. 

It wasn’t exactly the safest state of mind for a man with a gun on either hip.

But he trusted them, his six idiots, and maybe they trusted him, too, because not one of them ever so much as side-eyed him for the way his iron-clad control over his gift slipped in times like those.  When he started catching echoes of his own emotions—slow and warm, muffled-soft, pleased-pleasant- _safe_ —in other folks’ heads, it was a sure-fire sign that he was projecting strong enough to be overwhelming.  It was also a sure-fire sign that he’d passed the point where he could _stop_.

But when morning came, and Vasquez woke up enough to realize what he’d done, no one seemed to mind.  In fact—Horne pressed a heavy paw down on his shoulder as he passed, a friendly touch.  Billy nodded at him, like they were sharing some sort of secret, and Vasquez realized that Goody had slept the whole night through without nightmares for the first time in a week.  Even Chisolm and Red Harvest seemed calmer than usual, like something stuck tight had shaken free.  Vasquez could out and out feel the difference in his gift as they all went about their business for the day.

“You should drink more often, V,” Faraday told him, gleeful, once they were back on the road for the day.  “Felt like every good thing in the world come at once.  Hell, Chisolm got drunk just off your _thoughts_.”

There wasn’t a single moment, as far back as he could recall, where someone saw his gift as something _good_ , something to be used.  He didn’t want to think too hard about why something so simple made him feel like his ribcage was cracking open from the inside-out.

* * *

Time passed, as time did.  Vasquez let it pass over him, let himself take part of something good, and didn’t fight it.  He got used to the status quo: Chisolm and Red Harvest and Horne as the steady core, Billy and Goody tied together at the hip, and Faraday—always Faraday, and Vasquez wasn’t ashamed that everyone knew Faraday was his favorite.  They were all good men—not necessarily good people, but good men all the same, and there was something thrilling in being a part of that.  Just about anything would have been an improvement over the scratched-raw feel of running and hiding, of being so alone it made his bones ache and his skin crawl, but this was good.  This was _better than good_.  He couldn’t ask for anything more.

* * *

One morning he woke to a camp in chaos, Faraday missing but all his belongings right where they’d been left the night before, all the way from his bedroll to his horse.  For a solid three minutes, Horne couldn’t See a single future with Faraday in it, and no one could say for sure if he was alive or dead.  Even when they were sure he was alive, they couldn’t figure out where he’d gone or how to find him, and Vasquez felt that Faraday-inspired urge to laugh even though the wind had been knocked out of him.

So maybe he’d been wrong before—maybe there was one last thing he could wish for.

* * *

Emotions weren’t simple, and just because Vasquez had a line on what a person might be feeling didn’t mean he was privy to every thought in their heads.  Even the most straightforward feelings had variations, gradations, different shades and tones that could form in a thousand different ways from a thousand different sources.  Happiness, for example, could run sharp and ecstatic and high like the whistle of birdsong, or it could echo low and steady as the pealing of a bell.  Sadness always reminded him of water, and it could churn and froth like river rapids, but it could also stand as quiet and still as the surface of a lake, hiding its depths somewhere out of reach.

And those were only the simplest concepts, the ones that could always be pinned down and named.  Others were much harder; parts of them didn’t make sense, didn’t fit whatever picture he had of the emotion in himself.  True grief, for example, always held the faintest edge of surprise.  Confidence sometimes had a streak of self-consciousness, like the person feeling it wasn’t quite certain it was allowed.  Affection, in all its forms, had a million little tricks and nuances, a million little ways it felt different, every time.

Maybe he could be forgiven for not knowing this particular emotion right off.

Of course, Vasquez had experienced it before, and it was just as real as anything else even if it was only ever from a distance.  He’d never  _felt_  it, though, not like this—never had the feeling create itself in him, and it was nothing like he’d thought it would be.  It was nothing like anything he’d felt before.

It wasn’t loud.  It was not a chorus of angels, of wind chimes or bells.  It was tuneless, voiceless.  It buzzed through him, a thrum of deep bass that settled under his skin and rattled his bones, rattled the core of him,  _changed_  him.  It was everywhere, inescapable.  Vasquez was terrified by the idea of it, and yet he thought, maybe, that he wasn’t as terrified as he should be.

  _Oh_ , he thought, feeling it and knowing it as Faraday came stumbling up the wooden steps, bruised and bleeding but safe, alive—felt it as Faraday came jolting back from the dead, as they pressed up back-to-back in a firefight on a dusty street, as an unsteady drunk stared down a thing he feared and grinned like a shark—felt it sometimes soft and sometimes fierce, a hundred different times in a hundred different ways— _oh, I love him._

* * *

Vasquez reached out, and Faraday leaned in.  Faraday moved, and Vasquez followed; Vasquez moved, and Faraday tracked every moment of it, kept one eye on his own business while the other followed Vasquez’s every shift in place. 

Maybe he could be forgiven for making the assumption, same as Leo Halleck, that he and Faraday were both were thinking the same thing.

The conversation down in the bar, just before they were meant to meet up with Sheriff Halleck, couldn’t have come at a worse time.  The stakes were too high, and there just wasn’t enough damn time to talk it all out.  Vasquez had an advantage no one else would, though, and Faraday’s emotions were a tangled mess, a blast of negativity that made Vasquez jerk away and cover his mental ears—maybe he didn’t know exactly what Faraday was thinking, but that was cue enough for him to pull back.

As he turned to walk away, Vasquez felt a slow-dawning sense of horror at the thought that all this time, he might have been breaking his own most important rule, and cutting in where he wasn’t wanted.  He’d never wanted to take advantage, but there was a difference between allowing contact and seeking it out, and maybe he’d crossed that line somewhere along the way.  Vasquez had been going half on instinct and half on the way that the quiet murmuring sweetness in his chest caught on whatever Faraday’s mind was whispering back, but that was no guarantee that Faraday wanted the same things—just that he maybe didn’t mind whatever casual affection Vasquez dealt out.

It turned out that Vasquez might have tied himself up with Faraday more firmly than he’d meant to, way back when all this had first started, but that had only ever been on him.  And maybe it would hurt more now to pull free than it would have then (with a voice in the back of his head that whispered that he _loved_ —), but that wasn’t Faraday’s concern, or his obligation.  He’d always known this moment was coming, and damn what he might have wanted—hoped—along the way.

Vasquez was many things, but he wasn’t weak and he wasn’t a thief.  He wouldn’t steal what wasn’t given freely.

* * *

Never mind the parts of him that felt like they’d been scraped raw and torn open.  Never mind the way it felt to wake up covered in blood and slow-drying alcohol, shattered glass and splintered wood, only to find that Faraday was _gone_.  Never mind how much it felt like finding himself back in that cabin in the middle of nowhere, cold and alone and empty, to find Faraday again and still be unable to touch and make sure.

He could do it.  He _would_ do it.

* * *

“What do you want?” Faraday asked, kept asking, and as much as Vasquez wanted to avoid the question, he didn’t actually try that hard to escape it.

“I want _you,_ ” he said, but also “I want _nothing_ that you do not choose to give me,” and it was a terrifying thing, tearing the words one by one out of his chest, holding out that piece of himself for Faraday to crush.  He’d spent too much time living in fear to let it keep holding him back here and now, even if nothing good would come of the truth but the truth itself.

Except Faraday had never quite done what he’d expected.

“In that case, _what in the hell are you doing all the way over there_?” Faraday said, and leaned forward, and reached out, his mind practically shouting to be heard—raw terror and blind confusion crushed under the weight of affection, clear and certain.  And then there was something a step beyond affection, almost like—almost as if—

 _Oh,_ Vasquez thought, said, felt, stunned and surprised and starting to fill with a cautious sort of hope that Faraday had to be able to feel in turn.  He’d never been able to keep a lid on his gift around this man for long.

 _Oh, I know this,_ he thought, while some warm flood of emotion ran over him like a wave at high tide.   _Oh, I know this—this is what love feels like,_ except it wasn’t Vasquez feeling it.

 _Oh, I love him,_ Vasquez thought, _and he—_

* * *

Vasquez only looked away for what felt like a second, but a second was an eternity in a gunfight—he wasn’t looking when Faraday died for the second time.

He knew Goodnight screamed out Faraday’s name.  There was a crash, the sound of wood breaking, only worth noticing because it was off in the direction where Faraday had been last, headed over to help Horne.  The firestorm didn’t so much as falter, guns still firing and men still crying out as they hit the dirt, as if nothing of interest had taken place.

Vasquez knew better.  The silence, the place where Faraday’s mind had been, was unmistakable.

 He lost time, no more than a couple of seconds.  Then the world turned over, and when it steadied again there was dirt and rock digging into his back, almost offensively real, and Billy Rocks overhead, controlled fury-and-fear backlit by the sun and clenching both fists in Vasquez’s shirtfront.  Anyone else, and Vasquez might have worried about the knives in his hands scraping against his collarbones.  “ _No_ ,” Billy said, and bared his teeth.  “No.  Get it together.”

The crack of Goody’s rifle gave them a few seconds of cover, and for once Billy’s slippery-vague mind was stripped open for Vasquez to read.  He caught his breath between his teeth, because Billy—Billy understood, and didn’t understand, and hoped he never would.

He found his feet.  His guns were still in his hands.  He  _got it together_.

There were things he wished—things he wanted—but those were useless, so he swallowed regret and petty selfishness thick as tar and somehow kept them down.  It hadn’t even been one full day, a breath of time quick enough to count in minutes.  It wasn’t enough time at all.   _It’s not fair_ , he caught himself thinking, except that wasn’t true: Emma Cullen had dragged Faraday from the grave once already, one chance more than most people would ever get, and maybe this was what he deserved for dragging his feet in return.

He couldn’t think about it.  He didn’t have time to think about it.  There was a voice in the back of his mind whispering that this wasn’t about him, about what he would never have now.  This was Faraday’s, this was  _his_  loss, the loss of him—all that joy and mischief and sheer animal stubbornness gone beyond their grasp, no matter how far Vasquez reached, no matter how hard he strained for some kind of contact.

Maybe he really was selfish.  But he wanted it anyway—just one more touch.  He hadn’t known that last moment was going to be the last.

He couldn’t have it.

So instead Vasquez did what he’d never been stupid enough to do before: he  _put it away_.  He boxed it up.  He pretended he couldn’t feel it.  It made him twist up inside; it was an abuse of his gift and he knew it, knew all the ways an empath couldn’t afford to lose hold of his own emotions.  He could feel his powers warping along the edges the same way even the strongest steel would warp under enough strain.  But that was alright.  He could lock his gifts up, out of sight and out of mind.  He didn’t want to use them anyway, not in this moment, when he knew he wouldn’t find what he was looking for.  There was nothing left to find.

And then—what was left was this, him, scraping down along the bottom of his barrel, scrambling to catch the end of his rope.  He was almost surprised to find the anger there, a directionless, growling sensation that made his teeth ache.  It didn’t hurt him any to pick that up instead, to let it sharpen his aim and push him toward something vicious.

What were you supposed to say when the man you—the man you were fond of—died?  What were you supposed to do?

Actually, he had that last part down, body moving almost without his permission as he gritted his teeth and threw himself back into the fight, as he ducked and dodged and aimed and fired, fired, fired.  He had that part, even if he near-about shot Chisolm in the chest when the man got too close up behind him.  He hadn’t sensed a thing.

The part of him still bothering to think was counting out allies and enemies, dodging gunfire and refusing to let him wonder what happened when the fight came to an end.

This time, there was no Emma Cullen standing by to make things right.  This time, it was playing for keeps.  He didn’t waste time praying for miracles.

He’d forgotten that Faraday seemed to live to prove him wrong.

 * * *

 Once Vasquez knew Faraday was gifted, it was easy enough to start to see the way the powers shaped the man and the man shaped the world around him.  Vasquez was no expert on gifts and the gifted, but he’d never lacked for that little voice in the back of his head that whispered _careful_ when he came across something particularly dangerous.  Faraday, talking about “little tricks” and “superstitions,” held raw power and raw potential cupped between his hands and his deck of cards, and Vasquez had seen _dangerous,_ seen _predator_.  The fact that Faraday was on their side didn’t change that much.

What Vasquez knew was this: Faraday’s gift wasn’t a miracle.  Vasquez had never seen a true miracle, and presumably he never would.  Hell, he still hadn’t really seen Faraday’s powers, either, just parlor tricks, side-effects—some bits and pieces of the aftermath.  It was an easy thing to miss, and almost easy to  _dismiss_ , with nothing more to show for it than a shiver up his spine and the fact that Faraday was still there, still alive, despite every stupid choice and unlikely coincidence.

There wasn’t anything like it in the world.  Vasquez could see the way Billy’s body curved around bullets; he couldn’t see fate and happenstance curve around Faraday, or even know for certain that it had happened at all.

So, it wasn’t quite a miracle, but looking at Faraday and his powers felt like looking at the edges of one, like the void where something miraculous should be.  It felt like standing next to a fire he couldn’t see, like feeling that warmth without seeing the light.  If he stood in just the right place, if he squinted, if he tipped his head just right, he could just about make out the shape of it.  The rest of the time, it almost felt like a trick of the light.

Almost, almost.

* * *

Seeing Faraday walk out of that hut, alive and mostly intact, was almost enough to make him second-guess that belief.  As it was, he didn’t think he’d ever fully be able to describe the way it had almost taken his knees out from under him.  There wasn’t much time for weakness, but Vasquez had to take at least a moment to reach out, skin-on-skin, just to know for sure—

 _He was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found_.

It wasn’t a miracle, not really.  But it was probably the closest anyone would ever get.

* * *

It hit him, eventually, the thought that this—Faraday, gifted and alive and _here_ , with him—this was a thing he got to keep.  Faraday, possessive bastard that he was, clearly intended to keep him, too.  It was hard not to trust in that when the man walked around shouting it in all but voice.

If someone came to collect on his bounty and take him in—if they had enough sheer, dumb luck to get past Chisolm and Red, to avoid Billy’s knives and Goody’s gun, all without Horne managing to See it coming—then Faraday would probably be right behind him if he wasn’t already standing alongside, guns in hand and itching for a fight.  If he ran off to live in a broken-down shack in the middle of nowhere, Faraday would probably find some way to track him down, bully his way into the house, and set up a smuggling ring in the nearest town.  (Chisolm would probably blame Vasquez for the whole thing, even the parts that were obviously Faraday’s fault.)  Vasquez _believed_ it.

Maybe he shouldn’t have found the whole thing quite so endearing.  But it was—good.  Warm.  _Safe_.  He didn’t have words big enough for emotions like these, the ones that expanded in his chest until he thought they might crack open his ribcage.  And they were better, even, when Faraday clearly felt them too.

* * *

 Vasquez’s first life had ended—badly, all things considered.  The second one might have started with the promise of near-certain death, but Vasquez was starting to think it would be safe to hope for something better this time around.

After all, where Faraday was involved, luck would always turn out on their side.

**Author's Note:**

> Kat2107 - I hope you are not disappointed.
> 
> The rest of you - I feel a little like I'm shouting out into the void. Is anyone still here? How's everyone been lately? I have missed you


End file.
